The union government on Wednesday released the roadmap for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) deployment in the country in a time-bound manner.
It has also decided to form an IPv6 Task Force in Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode, for timely implementation of IPv6 in the country.
This was disclosed by the minister of communications and information technology A Raja in New Delhi, while releasing the National IPv6 Deployment Roadmap. IPv4, the initial version of the address platform, is already overburdened in India, with 18.4 million registered addresses, and is expected to exhaust the available space globally by March 2012.
This initiative of the government has come at a time when a concerted effort is needed on part of all stakeholders to migrate to a higher platform i.e. IPv6, he said.
Stating that IPv6 deployment in India has so far been mostly a government-led initiative, the minister invited all the stakeholders to come forward and to make the activities of this task force a success.
He said that this roadmap and the formation of the IPv6 Task Force together would enable citizens to start using IPv6 services by March 2012. For this, all telecom and internet service providers are required to become IPv6-compliant by December-2011, and offer IPv6 services thereafter.
The important issue of transition from IPv4 to IPv6 in the country has emerged as a critical concern for quite some time, in view of the increasing demand for IP addresses and the global scarcity of free space on IPv4 platform. Fast exhaustion of IPv4 address space, growing demand for new addresses globally, and expanding communication networks have necessitated timely action and the implementation of new strategies to address the issue.
IPv6 has 128 bits as compared to the limited addressing space of only 32 bits in IPv4. The Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC), the technical arm of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), has brought out this National IPv6 Deployment Roadmap for implementation by all telecom and internet service providers, central and state government departments, industry associations, educational institutes, equipment manufacturers and all other stakeholders after conducting various workshops throughout the country in the last one year.
Speaking on the occasion, minister of state for communications and information technology Sachin Pilot said that the Internet Protocol is slowly emerging as a global standard for communication. The current Internet protocol IPv4 served well in last 25 years, but has practical limitations, he said.
The new Internet protocol will give practically unlimited addresses, besides a host of new and advanced features for running the future communication networks, Pilot added.
Secretary, Department of Information Technology, R Chandrashekhar said that IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol with an improvement over the initial version of IPv4.
It is a scalable Internet technology with a potential to help the Internet reach 1.1 billion people of India. Stating that USA, EU, Japan and other countries are deploying IPv6 today, he said that the role of IPv6 is not limited to Internet access alone, and that it is also important in Defence, e-governance and other crucial government projects. IP security in IPv6 provides end-to-end security, implying that data is secured from the originating workstation through various routers of the Internet to the destined workstation.
Clarifying the important features of the new version of Internet addresses, Chandra Prakash, Member (T), said that all major service providers (having at least 10,000 internet customers or STM-1 bandwidth) will target the handling of IPv6 traffic and offer IPv6 services by December-2011. All central and state government ministries and departments, including its PSUs, shall switch over to IPv6 services by March-2012.
The transition from IPv4 to IP6 will affect many organisations, and no organisation can bring this change alone. The Task Force will bring together the stakeholders to discuss, develop and implement the strategies for making the transition possible.
Courtesy: INN